Fighting Skin Cancer: Big News

We love it when there's seriously promising news about fighting skin cancer. And this qualifies. According to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, a new pill still in the early stages of trials has shown to reduce the growth of melanoma tumors in 80 percent of the people involved in the tests (it even made the tumor disappear completely in a few of the patients). The pill works to inhibit the "faulty" gene that activates the protein that stimulates tumor growth in some patients. The responses to the pill are not always long-lasting, so it will be a while before people will be treated with the pill, but the authors of the study are optimistic. "In future, we hope to combine PLX4032 with other anti-melanoma drugs currently being developed," lead researcher Paul Chapman of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York told the Telegraph.